Out of the Woods: Nature, Sexuality, and Faith in the Forest

By Luke Turner

• Shortlisted for the prestigious Wainwright Prize
• An insightful take on nature writing; includes the author’s perspectives and experiences as a bisexual man—a perspective that’s often missed in the genre.
• A highly compelling, and relatable, memoir that helps one learn to find peace in the grey areas of life. 
• Timely: Luke Turner writes beautifully about the complexities of masculinity and male sexuality; a topical subject in today’s #metoo era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771647243

Book preview

1

The Man in the Forest

As a child I entered Epping Forest through a picture. The Victorian print on the magnolia wall of my parents’ living room was the portal that took me there. Branches reached out from the black and white ink into a dismal glade, threatening to drag me into their hollow, secret places, their gnarls and whorls. In the sky, wind-blown scraps of birds. A man, ragged and set about in the gale, trudging slowly towards the dark mass of the distant forest. He seemed so insubstantial to me, an inhuman wraith or perhaps a man doomed, about to be swallowed up and never released. I knelt on a chair and stared at this picture for hours, at once compelled by it yet struck by an unnerving dread.

Now, at the age of thirty-six, I found myself sitting opposite a man just like the etched wanderer in the kitchen of my uncle and aunty’s house in Theydon Bois, a village towards the northern end of the forest. I won’t refer to him by name because he doesn’t want to be found. I don’t want to take away his Epping Forest, a place he couldn’t have expected to see again on that day a few years ago when he climbed onto a chair, fastened a dog leash to a light fitting and fashioned a noose to put round his neck.

The man who lived in the forest was matter-of-fact and bright-eyed that morning. My aunty passed him a biscuit and asked what had happened to the mobile phone he’d been given in case of emergencies, when he was alone in his camp somewhere out in the woods. He looked at her, bemused. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’m a forest spirit. I’m just more content getting rid of the radio, the telephone, the trappings.’

It was a dreary day in the middle of a mild January, and across the road the trunks of Epping Forest were an unforgiving grey, dormant now until spring, lifeless as sculptures made of steel slag. Outside the kitchen door, chaffinches and coal tits negotiated their shifts on a container stuffed with pumpkin seeds. My eyes were drawn to a ghostly outline on the window where the attack of a sparrowhawk – not spotting the panes of glass that separated it from the trees of Epping Forest – on a feeding songbird had thumped to a premature conclusion, its near-death captured with an imprint of oily wings.

The man was almost seventy, stood around six feet tall and held himself solidly, despite an awkward gait caused by severe arthritis. His head was bald on top, but hair, yellow-white nicotine curtains, curled down his neck into a gloriously unkempt beard that was frayed at the edges, like half-hearted winter ice on a pond. His skin was deeply grooved and tanned a rich brown that seemed at odds with a life spent under the trees. Beneath fox-whisker brows his large, round eyes were an intense blue. He peered at me inquisitively, clearly wondering who I was and why I was there. The week before, my aunty had intercepted him on his morning walk to the Costa coffee machine in Tesco to ask if he wouldn’t mind stopping by. To be honest, I was as perplexed as he was. I was distracted, conscious that the last time I’d been in this house everything had been different.

Over the decade and a half I’d lived in London, rising rents had forced me to make my way from the centre out towards Epping Forest, from the edges of the city in Old Street to Hackney and eventually Walthamstow. I’d moved there a few years before with my girlfriend, Alice, and when I entered through the front door for the first time my impulse had been to race upstairs and look out of the bedroom window. Over the William Morris Gallery and beyond the streets of the suburb of Chingford I could see past London, where Epping Forest was a green slab against the late-summer haze. I imagined everything beneath that rich canopy was peaceful and green. The warm smell of beech leaves. The birdsong and the filtered light. I had dreamed of living near this landscape for years.

During a childhood moving around the country, Epping Forest was the one constant. Both my parents had grown up on the edge of the forest, and I loved Dad’s stories about school break-times when he’d be allowed to run across the road and play amid the trees. My mum remembered how her brothers would go into the forest at night to watch badgers, and build dams across the streams. It had ignited in Mum and Dad a love of the natural world that was intricately bound up with their Christian faith. It had seemed idyllic to imagine this semi-wilderness on the doorstep rather than the football games and dog walkers of the dull municipal park we lived near in a town a half-hour drive east along the M25. I’d spend hours drawing imaginary maps of the forest’s Lost Pond. When we’d visit my uncle, he’d take me for walks and teach me the names of trees and how to identify them by their bark and foliage, and we’d balance huge branches on our shoulders to take home for his fire.

Years later, living with the forest hovering at the edge of my field of vision turned my casual interest into an obsession. Every morning and evening, as I stood cleaning my teeth, dribbling toothpaste over the carpet and piled-up clean washing, I would stare out towards the horizon where, on a clear day, the spire of High Beach Church could be seen, a pinprick above the trees against the sky. As a kid I could access the forest on a family visit or via that transporting picture on the wall. Now it was mine, whenever I might want it. It was always changing, this distant view beyond the rooftops of the suburbs. In the spring and summer it was a slowly evolving smear of greens. In the autumn the dirty browns and oranges were tempered by rain and mist. Winter treetops made a steely line against the glow from the lights of the Metropolitan Police’s helicopter base on the far side of the forest at Lippitt’s Hill. Once, as I was returning home at 3 a.m. after a midweek rave, a huge electrical storm encircled London. I stood naked at the door, watching the forest explode like a blown-out negative as Alice tried to sleep behind me.

If I left our front door, turned right and then right again past the William Morris Gallery, then walked for ten minutes along Forest Road via the recently gentrified Bell pub, a sex shop that probably gave its last thrill around the turn of the millennium, two chip shops and a Homebase, I would come to Waterworks Roundabout, where cattle grids buzz incongruously under the wheels of cars heading onto the North Circular. From here you can dive into the forest, and be under the cover of its leaves before emerging into the open fields of Essex – a twelve-mile-long, 6,000-acre green snake of beech, hornbeam, common oak and silver birch from the edges of the urban and suburban, from London’s East End to the Essex countryside beyond.

My first year living with this view was a time of stability and happiness. For a while I felt as if some of the struggles that had shaped my first three decades might have been banished by this sensible domesticity within sight of the forest. In simple rituals I would try and imbue every aspect of my life with its presence. Alice and I would take carrier bags to bring back wood from the forest for our open fire just as my parents had to theirs, and I’d sit and watch the flames take, feeling a rare contentment. The smoke from our chimney was a signal back to the forest that I had finally come home. I experienced it as a place of quiet reflection and contemplation, as millions of happy souls do their favourite landscapes.

It was not to last; for my family Epping Forest has always been a place of both beginnings and endings.

That morning, before I’d driven a borrowed car to visit the man who lived in the forest, I’d awoken on a narrow foam mattress in the dusty box room of my friends’ house. I’d been there a few months, a more-than-temporary place to crash after I’d had to leave the home I shared with Alice when our relationship slowly crumbled away a few months before. It hardly felt like any time at all since we’d been in bed knackered after days trying to clear the mass of builder’s rubble and bramble from the bombsite back garden, texting about dinner, or inadvertently spending a night sharing a bottle of gin during those lubricated, intimate conversations that can hold a relationship together. One evening we took the train to Chingford and strolled towards Yates’ Meadow and my favourite view over London. When the sun dipped and sent the treetops on the opposite slope into cobbled relief, the light might have affirmed that we were on the right journey, together. I felt a gnawing when it didn’t.

There had been no explosion, no betrayal. When any relationship ends we fail to pinpoint the exact moment at which the worry that something is amiss becomes its own logic, a potent, destructive and irresistible force. Much of it was my fault. Once again, my sexual orientation had begun to flow in confused directions and I struggled against the binary rules of heteronormative love. At the same time, long-standing, hardwired compulsions had started to make their presence known, demanding to be answered. As I did my best to wrestle with them, I had closed off from her. Upset, she’d reacted by moving out to her sister’s place for a week.

I’d spent those days on my own in the house expecting the crisis to blow over. I took a group of pals for a Sunday walk in the forest and tried to put a brave face on it all, unwilling to accept the path that was emerging in my life. A couple on the walk had recently split up. It was awkward, but they seemed fine. It set to work a tiny niggle in the back of my mind that I, or those old compulsions, might want my relationship to go a similar way. Yet when later that evening Alice came back to the house and said she knew it was over, I collapsed to the floor of the bedroom that looked out towards Epping Forest, face scraping the rough carpet, and screamed. When she asked me to move out a few days later, I couldn’t bear to take a final look at the view.

Back on that January morning, the dregs of my tea had turned as cold as the misty forest outside. My thoughts wandered to the sickness in the belly that is a symptom of a future wrenched away. I desperately wished that I could draw some comfort from the words of the man who lived in the forest as he told me how he’d decided not to die that day under his makeshift noose, but had come to live in his tent on the other side of Genesis Slade instead. ‘I was trying to be happy,’ he said. ‘If I get myself into a bad position, I will very strongly think, I like this. Mind over matter, cause and effect.’

I stayed for a while longer. My uncle and aunty wanted to know what had happened with Alice, of whom they’d been very fond. I tried to put a positive spin on it, though I wasn’t feeling it at all. As soon as I had to speak of her a voice inside my head would strike up a counter-narrative against the words coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t the right thing to do, that quiet interior murmur told me. I still loved her. And deeper and more secretly still, the rush as soon as we’d broken up to feel the naked press of a man on top of me had only made me feel more confused. It was the latest manifestation of a self-destructive pattern that had disrupted my life since my teenage years. I watched the logs from Epping Forest catch in the grate of the fire that as a kid I’d loved to stoke, and felt myself sink into regret.

That morning I’d parked the borrowed car badly, somehow managing to impale it on a branch, and it took ages of metal screeching on wood to untangle. Driving up the hill away from the village into the forest, I caught sight of the man trudging slowly along. I slowed down and tooted the horn and he waved, beard splitting into a grin. I didn’t want to go back to the city, but he’d be off for hours now, wandering until dark, talking to his friends be they human, canine, fox or tree. ‘I walk and walk and walk, even with my knees,’ he’d told me over tea. ‘I’ve got all the time in the world. To see all those things!’

I kept an eye on the rear-view mirror and watched his loping form gradually become indistinct against the violent contortions of the forest behind, my eyes lost thirty years, and there I was, kneeling on an old chair in my parents’ living room, the light of evening catching the slow dances of dust and fluff, staring into that picture. That twisted form, lost and buffeted by the weather and nature and endless power of Epping Forest, wasn’t the man on the road at all. It was me.

2

The Blizzard of the World

I spent the New Year’s Eve after Alice and I broke up with friends in a bungalow down on the north Kent shore of the Thames Estuary. Hungover, and then topping it back up again for the first three days of the new year, I felt an invisible, thick barrier begin to ooze round me as if I had rolled and caked myself in the mud of the river’s shallows. I tried to be swept along by the communal jollity of the season in those days but ended up wandering off on my own, for nothing could replace what I had lost.

On New Year’s Day I climbed onto a rickety pile of rotting hay bales to try and force the sea air to wash my nausea away and looked upriver, towards London. I wondered who Alice might have kissed at midnight. New Years we’d shared before came flooding back – by a river in Devon, laughing at the pensioners dancing on a table as if it were a boat on the beer-soaked sea of the pub floor, or the night she’d tried to cut my hair with the kitchen scissors and left me with hacked tramlines before we went out to lose ourselves in each other at a never-ending rave.

A familiar voice started muttering in the back of my head and, without thinking, I switched on Grindr. A hopeful man with a St George’s cross profile picture over on the north bank in Southend offered to get in his van and drive across the QEII Bridge to fuck me. He was persistent. I deleted the app, again. There’s nothing like the offer of a pounding from a plumber to make you feel utterly alone.

I had hoped that the New Year trip would be a fresh start, that the natural ebb of life would soon smooth the jagged promontories of loss and my painful memories. I had forgotten that it takes many tides to wash the dirt of London down the Thames and out into the North Sea, and for months it had felt impossible to make headway against the flow.

The lust of London is so time- and energy-sapping that those who have been consumed by it often find it hard to leave, even for a moment. In the decade or so before I’d moved nearer to the forest and it’d become part of my life again, I’d only rarely ventured up there. Back then, it was a place of memory shaped by childhood fancy. When Alice and I broke up and I had to leave the house that looked over the distant forest, I started to feel my connection with that place fracture. The two relationships had become so entwined with my adult identity that when one clunked off track it disrupted everything else. I wanted the forest back, to reclaim it as I saw it as a child, as if those maps I’d drawn might come alive around me and give me shelter against the sickening loss I was struggling to face.

Again and again during that damp and mildewed winter I travelled up to Chingford and Loughton to trudge around the oozing woodland. I borrowed Dad’s Epping Forest history books to absorb the place in every way I could. A friend told me the London Metropolitan Archives were free to access and I spent hours leafing through crumbling Victorian documents – keepers’ reports, formal orders for hams, uniforms and adzes, ammo for squirrel hunts, newspaper cuttings about conservation campaigns and murders. When faced with the deathly silent grief of the end of love, my instinct was to obscure it with a hurricane of distraction, day and night, from forest and London alike. I whirled from that thin foam mattress to work, snatched hours in the archives or up in the forest before heavy pub sessions or another Tinder or Grindr date. On too many mornings the unfamiliar light of an unknown bedroom and a stranger’s warmth next to me would stab through the hangover with a panicking awareness of all I had lost.

One evening, after a walk that had yet again failed to clear my mind, I read a news story about a tribe deep in the Brazilian jungle that had recently been photographed from the air for the first time. If it was that Epping Forest print on my parents’ wall that had haunted my impressionable younger years, it was this digital image, screen-grabbed and saved onto my phone, that consumed me now. I still have it. The rich green of the canopy broken by a pustule, a clearing in which a circular structure had been built. A gap of a few metres between the rich growth of the surrounding trees and seventeen large rectangular mats of dried thatch that touched the ground on the forest side, each rising to sit atop a strut to form a simple hut. It was a maloca, an encampment of a sub-group the Yanomami people called the Moxihatetema. Shielded against the murk of the trees beyond, in those mats of leaves and vines under which fires would burn at night we see reflected an ancient human desire to separate ourselves from the forest. Nothing has changed, save for the materials with which we build our huts. What were once tiny settlements like the Moxihatetema’s maloca would eventually become London and all the other cities of the world that displaced the forests and filled up with people who feared them.

It’s only in recent years that the commonly held view that Britain and Northern Europe have always been covered in an impenetrable mass of continuous forest was revised, and a far more complex picture emerged. If in 2006 even the late, great arboreal expert Oliver Rackham wrote in the last edition of his seminal book Woodlands that he had previously been mistaken about the matter, then we may also now question how that myth of an untouched, primeval forest which we humans invaded might have shaped our understanding of ourselves. One afternoon, trying to distract myself from yet another fruitless search to find somewhere permanent to live, I discovered that recent research into genetic distribution at the end of the last Ice Age reveals that humans hadn’t retreated south into the woods with the glaciers’ advance, but instead lived predominantly in tree-scattered savanna, the predecessor of the open woodland pasture that once characterised the Epping Forest landscape. Here the trees were more easily cut and manipulated than within the forest, providing not just fire for warmth and cooking but shelter, refuge from predators and weapons with which to hunt the larger game that roamed the more open land. I wondered what they would have made of the dense woodland beyond the plains.

As the ice sheets melted 10,000 years ago, Homo sapiens and trees alike began to move north, mounting a parallel invasion of what was once lost under ice. Maps charting the return of trees to Britain show, species by species, their lines of advance across the land: oak occupying Cornwall by 9500 BC, and a mere 500 years later reaching a band stretching from north Norfolk across the English Midlands to Snowdonia and the Llyn Peninsula. I thought of the humans who might already have inhabited that landscape: before the melting ice filled the English Channel and North Sea, Britain was still connected to the European continental mass and people can surely colonise a land mass far more quickly than trees. Just look at a map showing the return of trees to the British Isles, arrows indicating the direction of invasion – oak from the south-west, pines from the south-east and birch from the east – and you see an arboreal take on the advancing Nazi arrows in the opening credits of Dad’s Army.

If our Ice Age ancestors had kept away from the dense forests in their warmer, more open refugia far to the south, and some of their immediate descendants saw the trees advancing towards them like Birnham Wood fulfilling the witches’ prophecy in Macbeth, it’s no wonder we have a complex and uneasy